64 you should do what you want to do.' That was one of the few times that he and I ever communicated di- rectly. Now we are getting better at it. A big reason was me. After Mom died, I dealt with grief by walling it off. " Susan and her three children created a "double whammy" when they moved into the Baker ménage, according to one of the Baker lot. John Baker, who had been nine when his mother died, was quoted by Marjorie Williams as saying, "For me, he was never home, and so that was very difficult." As for the marriage, he added, "I was just bound and determined to make their life miserable, because I didn't care about anything else." He was con- sciously trying to break up the mar- riage. Susan had to cope with seven children, each of whom had experi- enced the loss of a parent and associated difficulties. I asked her what all that had been like. "It was explosive-wild," she said. "We were married in August, and enrolled three kids in the seventh grade in September. My oldest daughter was six months younger than Jimmy's youngest. There were only three bed- rooms at first, and they took turns sleeping on stair landings in sleeping bags. We expanded the house as fast as we could." Susan Baker is eight years younger than her husband, and, like him, she radiates a sense of well-being and se- renity, although reminders of past in- trusions on their life together-notably Baker's high-pressure years in the White House-suggest that she hasn't altogether got over them, and has de- cidedly mixed feelings about life near the top of the tree. She smiles easily, and is easy to talk to. Among the first things one hears about Susan Baker is the intensity of her religious faith and how it sustained her in the early days of her second marriage. "If I hadn't known about prayer and the word of God, I don't know what would have happened," she says. She was raised a Catholic, but is a member of a nonde- nominational Bible-study group that is closely identified with Joanne Kemp, the wife of Jack Kemp, who is Bush's Secretary of Housing and Urban De- velopment. "Faith is a way of life, not just a Sunday-go-to-meeting kind of thing," she says. She doesn't feel con- strained to be a member of any particu- lar church Susan Baker is an ally of Tipper Gore, the wife of Senator Al- bert Gore, Jr., in the campaign to regulate "porn rock." "All the kids are O.K. now and are doing something," Preston Moore says of the Baker children. The Bakers concur; the same, they add, is true of Susan's three. And Baker's friends say that his second marriage is as strong as the first. Susan, they feel, is less private than Mary Stuart, but, besides being close friends, the two women had in common an interest in politics, and Susan, too, had been a Bush belle. (Another former Bush belle from old Houston is Daphne Murray, who is the director of the Institute of Museum Services.) "I've been politicking since I was little," Susan says. "My parents helped organize the Republican Party in Brazoria County. Mary Stuart and I gave our husbands hell because they were thinking Republican and still vot- ing Democratic." Susan Baker didn't mind coming to Washington the first time, in 1975. By then, only two of the seven children had to be uprooted (the rest were away at school or college ), and Baker's job at the Commerce Department wasn't de- manding enough to intrude on their lives-yet he liked it. Most people, Baker included, believe that he was invited into the Ford Administration because George Bush, while serving as United States representative to the People's Republic of China, in the mid-seventies, had urged Rogers Mor- ton, who visited Beijing, to find a job for him. Bush and various other G.O.P. notables felt that fresh talent was needed in Washington if their party was to revive nationally in the post- Watergate period. Morton was the Secretary of Commerce, a job he was soon to leave to take over as chair- man of the Ford election campaign. Baker can't be sure that Bush did take such an initiative, because Bush, for , - ""'__.::=:.J .. rf ............' -' ., u f' ---=..:. - . -- I I I , ( . ' I m . i :. . .... t J,.. - ':'... ... ... '. . .. " .. . .. .. . , " . .. . .. . ' ,. MAY 7, 1990 whatever reason, has never admitted doing so. Baker's stint at Commerce was short-nine months-but for three months of that time he was Act- ing Secretary. He was keeping the chair warm for Elliot Richardson, who was then serving as Ambassador to the Court of St. J ames's. In the spring of 1976, Baker trav- elled to Houston on Air Force One with Gerald Ford, who asked him dur- ing the trip to leave Commerce and come to work on the campaign as chief delegate hunter. Ford's campaign was struggling, and his chief delegate hunter had just been killed in a car crash. The legend of Jimmy Baker, political wizard, begins right there. From the first day, he demonstrated instincts-how to deal with reporters, how to generate the appearance of win- ning-that cannot be taught. The chief delegate hunter isn't usually a potent or significant figure. A Presi- dential candidate's momentum nor- mally develops after the early prima- ries, and delegates can be scooped up then. But 1976 was different. The struggle between Ford and Reagan probably turned on thirty to sixty dele- gates, so each delegate was important. John Sears, Reagan's campaign man- ager and a highly skilled professional, was working at this job, too. He and Baker would both issue announcements whenever one or two delegates fell in the direction of their candidate. Baker added a new wrinkle: he would give reporters the phone number of a newly bagged delegate, so they could verify his information. Sears didn't do that- it wasn't customary-and the distinc- tion drawn by the press served Baker well: he acquired instant credibility. N or did it harm his cause to be able to arrange breakfast meetings at the White House for undecided delegates. (Some of them appeared to reporters to be breakfasting there constantly.) Baker immediately became known as accessible and easy to deal with. "He was very well organized, and that was what the Ford campaign needed," Sears recalls. "You could see the dif- ference after he arrived. The Reagan people thought they'd been doing well -playing the part of a less potent force than a sitting President but one that was more adroit politically and less prone to error. Baker straightened out that campaign." After the 1976 Republican Conven- tion, in Kansas City, Ford and his staff